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Media Bits and Bytes – You never know who your friends are edition

Anchors away; Tech targeted communities; Clear Channel chickens out; Facebook knows, you don’t; The Ellen Pao verdict

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A Dumb Job

By Frank Rich
April 5, 2015
New York Magazine

The interchangeable blandness of the two Nightly News anchors and the continuity of their viewership confirm the reality that lurked just beneath the moral outrage, torrential social-media ridicule, and Comcast executive-suite chaos of the Williams implosion: For all the histrionics, this incident of media blood sport was much ado about not so much. The network-news anchor as an omnipotent national authority figure is such a hollow anachronism in 21st-century America that almost nothing was at stake. NBC’s train wreck played out as corporate and celebrity farce rather than as a human or cultural tragedy because it doesn’t actually matter who puts on the bespoke suit and reads the news from behind a desk.

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Black America's State of Surveillance
By Malkia Amala Cyril
March 30, 2015
The Progressive

It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass.
For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance.
Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood.

Ad Firm Removes Gun Violence Signs Amid Protest
By Steve Annear
April 2, 2015
Boston Globe

The advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor on Thursday took down the billboards it donated to a campaign against gun violence, arguing that its support had been “misconstrued as a political position” by gun-rights advocates who mounted an online protest against the advertisements.
The billboards, which went up across the state this week, said, “We’re not anti-gun. We’re pro-life. Massachusetts Gun Laws Save Lives,” and featured a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle with a white surrender flag in the barrel.
Initially a full-throated supporter, Clear Channel said that it did not intend to take sides on gun control. It owns 25 of the 36 billboards planned for the campaign, which was organized by the group Stop Handgun Violence.

How Facebook Knows Who All Your Friends Are, Even Better Than You Do
By Caitlin Dewey
April 2, 2015
Washington Post

How does Facebook know who your friends are? It’s a mystery that has nagged users since at least 2011, when the Irish Data Protection Commissioner conducted a full-scale investigation into the issue. But four years later, there’s still a lot of confusion and misinformation about what Facebook’s doing when it “finds” your friends. Did it scrape your phone for names and numbers? Run a reverse-image search of your picture? Compile a “shadow” or “ghost” profile on you over a period of years, just waiting for you to log on and “confirm” its guesses?
Alas, Facebook’s actual process isn’t actually that sneaky or malicious. In fact, it involves this pretty complex academic field called, dun dun … network science.

Ellen Pao Disrupts How Silicon Valley Does Business
By Farhad Manjoo
March 27, 2015
New York Times

In Ellen Pao, Silicon Valley has found its newest disrupter. And the conventional order she has shaken up concerns the Valley itself and the clubby way of doing things in a place that fancies itself the emerging center of the world.
Often, Silicon Valley’s disrupters do not succeed on the terms they initially envision. So it was on Friday when a jury decided that Ms. Pao’s claims of gender discrimination against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers were without merit.
But while the verdict is a defeat for Ms. Pao, a former junior investing partner at the firm who stood to win potentially tens of millions in damages if she prevailed, the trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable.

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